Suicide bombers struck Shi'ite pilgrims in Baghdad and a Kurdish rally in Kirkuk July 28, killing at least 57 people and wounding nearly 300, police said. Three female bombers detonated their explosive vests in the middle of a group of pilgrims in Baghdad, moments after a roadside bomb attack. At least 32 were killed and wounded 102. In Kirkuk, 25 were killed and 185 wounded when a blast tore through a crowd of Kurds protesting against a draft provincial elections law. Authorities said the Kirkuk bomber was also a woman. (Gulf Daily News, July 29)

The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) denied involvement in two bombs that exploded in a busy Istanbul suburb on July 27, killing 17 people. "The PKK has nothing to do with this event," the group's leader, Zubeyir Aydar, said in a statement. Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, the deadliest in Istanbul since the November 2003 car bomb attacks on British and Jewish targets that left some 60 dead. But Istanbul's Gov. Muammer Guler said, "There appears to be a link with the separatist organization," referring to the PKK. "We are working on that."

Ahmedabad, capital of the Indian state of Gujarat, was hit by 17 blasts in a space of 70 minutes July 26, killing at least 45 and leaving some 150 injured—one day after eight near-simultaneous explosions rocked the southern city of Bangalore, killing one and wounding six. In an e-mail sent to New Delhi's Intelligence Bureau, a group calling itself the "Indian Mujahedeen" claimed responsibility for the Ahmedabad blasts. The same group also claimed responsibility for recent deadly bombings in Jaipur and Uttar Pradesh.

World War 4 Report is switching to a new server this weekend, and our Daily Report blog will be inactive during the transition. If all goes well, we should be rocking and rolling again in 24 hours or so. So please stay tuned. The August issue of our Electronic Journal should be out next weekend as scheduled. As always, you can subscribe here. And you can support our efforts at this particularly critical moment here. Gracias, shukran & thanks!

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced July 24 that it had received eight of ten persons detained by the FARC guerillas July 17 when their boat was stopped on the Río Atrato in Chocó departament. The captives, all civilians, were students, teachers, local functionaries and merchants from Quibdó, capital of Chocó. Their capture sparked a large mobilization of government troops to Chocó. (ANSA, July 24)

A suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up and injured 13 Algerian troops in an attack on an army convoy in Lakhdaria July 23. On June 8 a French engineer and his Algerian driver were killed in a bomb attack in the same area that was claimed by the North African wing of al-Qaeda network. (AFP, July 24) At the village of Beni Djemaa, Blida wilaya, jihadist insurgents ransacked a farmhouse and beheaded its 66-year-old owner, after demanding money the family had received under an agricultural aid program. (Magharebia, July 23)

Misha Glenny writes for the New Statesman, July 24:

Looking a little like God in a Cecil B DeMille film, Radovan Karadzic was genuinely unrecognisable when he was arrested on a Belgrade bus last Monday evening. Yet even more astonishing was the news that he had been working as a crystal-rubbing therapist promoting well-being to audiences around Serbia. The killer as New Age healer - you couldn't make it up.

In the third incident this month at a French nuclear plant, 100 employees were "slightly contaminated" July 23 at the Tricastin plant in the southern Vaucluse region, according to the EDF power company. EDF insisted the exposure was well below legal limits and the incident rated at "level zero" on the seven-point nuclear accident scale. But the Commission de Recherche et d'Information Indépendantes sur la Radioactivité (CRIIAD) said the legal annual limit for exposure to radioactivity was not "a level at which risk begins but a level of maximum permitted risk." Annie Thebaud-Mony, a researcher at France's INSERM medical research institute, said that "emphasising that the accident is minor...is a way of downplaying the fact that the employees are exposed to radioacitivity."